3 million overseas and military voters will be able to cast ballots on Internet this fall

WASHINGTON -- Nearly 3 million overseas and military voters from at least 33 states will be permitted to cast ballots over the Internet in November using e-mail or fax, in part because of new regulations proposed last month by the federal agency that oversees voting.

The move comes as state and federal election officials are trying to find faster ways to handle the ballots of these voters, which often go uncounted in elections because of distance and unreliable mail service.

About 22 percent of military and overseas voters surveyed were unable to return their ballots in the 2008 election because of such problems, according to the Overseas Vote Foundation, a nonpartisan advocacy group.

Cybersecurity experts, election officials and voting-integrity advocates, however, have raised concerns about the plan. They point out that e-mail messages can be intercepted, that voting websites can be hacked or taken down by malicious attacks, and that the secrecy of ballots is hard to ensure once they are sent over the Web.

"The commission's decision basically takes the hazards we've seen with electronic voting and puts them on steroids," said John Bonifaz, legal director of Voter Action, a nonprofit voting-rights group that sent a letter last month to the Election Assistance Commission, the agency that released the proposed guidelines.

A handful of states have allowed voters to cast ballots by e-mail or fax in prior elections, though the methods were usually limited to residents from specific pilot counties or to military voters in combat zones.

The coming election will be the first in which Internet voting will play a major role, now that 33 states have passed measures to allow their voters to cast ballots over the Internet. Jeannie Layson, a spokeswoman for the Election Assistance Commission, emphasized that the proposed guidelines, which will be finalized this month, are still only in draft form, that they would apply to only the November election and that new regulations would be devised for later elections.

"The EAC hopes that the work we do in 2010 will assist states already running pilot programs to improve services for military and overseas voters," Layson said.

A number of high-profile cases of hacking have raised new concerns about the security of Internet voting. Some members of Congress have vowed to slow the shift toward Internet voting.

Most security experts support the idea of using the Internet for registering to vote and for accessing blank ballots but not for transmitting completed ballots. Critics of the new guidelines say they are flawed because they allow voting machine vendors to do some of the performance and security testing themselves.

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